Wine and Cheese: Fugazi and Sleater-Kinney
The Washington bands align in crafting emotionally heartwrenching ballads; however, the two acts both drift across the axis of gender norms, creating music that subverts their gender identities in an appropriately moody, grungy sensibility.
Written by Zachary Bolash
Illustrated by Srisha Chakraborty
As documented by music journalist Lizzy Goodman, Seattle purportedly surpassed New York in the 1990s in creating edgy, alternative acts, representing a caliber of musicians otherwise culturally indigestible to suburban sensibilities. The artists created by the West Coast principality seemed to accord with the rainy and marshy climate of the Evergreen state. Artists here, such as Nirvana and Soundgarden, produced a distinct sound, marked by hazy guitars and vocal phlegm, that spawned a culture of baggy-shirt-wearing and a generation of teenage malcontents.
Acts Sleater-Kinney and Fugazi emerged from this sonic marsh, adherents to the gospel of grunge. The two bands both deconstructed grunge’s lo-fi guitar riffs into a technical, complex expression of passion, while adopting the gong-banging percussion that typified grunge at the time. However, both acts filled a needed but specific niche within the American ethos. Sleater-Kinney answered the cultural quorum call for a homoerotic rock band, conveying queer angst. Fugazi, on the other hand, were its straight male counterparts, opting for expressing raw and vulnerable sentiments that spited their masculine audiences.
The tension between these two artists is captured in the bands’ sister tracks, “Jumpers” and “Last Chance for a Slow Dance.” Sleater-Kinney’s “Jumpers” is so emotionally volatile and raw that it is almost as if lead singer Carrie Brownstein is committing an emotional seppuku; the song’s suicidal feeling is captured by stringy guitars and bass percussions as Brownstein whines, “the only substance is the fog, and it hides all that has gone wrong.” While the track is admittedly more concerned with the mental turmoil of Brownstein during a summer she spent in San Francisco, there are undeniable themes of queerness interwoven in the track. As Sleater-Kinney itself is a queer band, the feeling of resentment and the preconceived notions brought out from the world are especially pertinent for queer people. The track, in a sense, could be interpreted as an aughties, rage-inducing mouthpiece for LGBTQ+ Americans.
On the other hand, Fugazi’s “Last Chance for a Slow Dance” is a spiritual prequel to the early 2000s classic. The cut from the band’s fourth LP, In On the Kill Taker, shares many of the similarities to “Jumpers”’s sonic architecture. The track also features thrumming guitars occasioned by an interruption of a symphony overlaid percussion. Moreover, frontman Ian MacKaye’s wail resembles that of Brownstein’s whine, especially on similarly morbid lyrics like, “Warning / The threat of morning / That just extends you / Another day.” However, where Fugazi veers from the Kinney-traveled path is that “Last Chance for a Slow Dance” serves more as a temper-tantrum against the masculine order. In the 1990s, and even today, the patriarchy expected men to be stoic and unfeeling as cultural conservatism silently increased. Fugazi’s decision to unabashedly express their depression without yielding to gender expectations, as seen in the track’s lines of “Inside you’re breathing / Too numb for asking / So I will leave it / Outside your door,” is a choice that, while not queer, moved the needle on acceptable gender expression, allowing men to more thematic leg room to express their rich emotions.
“Jumpers” and “Last Chance for a Slow Dance” are merely one example of how these bands infuse a noisy, grunge sound to address gender sentiments. Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” and Sleater-Kinney’s “You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun” are more clever and less emotionally bleeding sister tracks. While still featuring electric acoustics and thumping percussion, both songs are tuned down, foregrounding Brownstein and MacKaye’s pointed lyricism. “You’re No Rock and Roll Fun” is a proverb from the Riot Grrrl bible; the track, viewed through a queer lens, censures the sexism hurled towards female rock bands. In the lines, “Although the best man / Won’t hang out with the girl band,” the band calls out the reluctance of men to accept female acts into grunge. Moreover, the song is irresistibly queer, with the band reclaiming supposed masculine traits as they joke and accuse men of being “No Rock and Roll Fun,” an appropriation of the sexist refrain that women are often “no fun.”
“Waiting Room” also features a criticism of gender norms, but its criticisms are much more subdued than “You’re No Rock and Roll Fun.” Similar to the track “Last Chance for a Slow Dance,” “Waiting Room” protests through mere gendered gall. The time period saw it as unmanly for men to complain about the agony of waiting or the mundanities of everyday life, or as Fugazi yelps, that they “wait and wait and wait” while “everybody’s moving, moving, moving.” MacKaye and his bandmates wanted to trumpet suffering, even if demasculating, to the toxic ethos.
These songs from the two West Coast mastheads solidify them as sonic complements, challenging the gendered rank-and-file. While Sleater-Kinney jumps the gun and kills the joy of the malecentric grunge scene, Fugazi is much more theatrical, challenging gendered norms through deliberate, subversive gendered performance. The two acts best exemplify gender norms either through direct confrontation or subtle subversion of the male ethos.
The two acts, emerging from the Seattle grunge scene, complemented each other and filled the cultural gaps within the grunge scene and the broader American musical landscape. Where there was a call for queer, untraditional femininity to channel its rage through some heavy bass, Sleater Kinney appeared. On the other hand, Fugazi manifested when there was a growing urgency to demonstrate the broad strokes and palette of male emotions. The acts are quintessentially a “wine and cheese.”